Have been using Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com) recently and really like their interface/ease of use and ability to help me articulate the impact SM is having on our business! Great job guys!
And, we’re making progress with a new FaceBook Brand page, thanks much to RoyalPink Productions, however, we are still struggling a fair amount with compliance and the main corporate blog site/rules. It’s tough for us, as a heavily regulated business, to set the proper review/approve process in place without seeming so stale in blog responses as to make the effort not worth it. We want to be “transparent”, but we’re also restricted from providing “advice” and much (if not all) of the questions we see posting online are due to an overall lack of education on our product. It will be a tough balance…
Finally, props to MySpace for the work they’ve been doing under the hood. I can imagine how tough it is to see all the press for FB, and the traffic numbers! While, all the while building/re-building/adding slowly to make sure you have a scalable, sellable product. Kudos. I still use FB a lot more than MySpace, but I suspect that will slowly change soon…
And, to Google TV reps for keeping it real in your pitches. “Beta” is just fine as long as you’re honest…And, to YouTube, for just keeping it plain fun!
ACEdge
Or, perhaps I should say…Time flies when you are having so much fun. Apologies for no updates to the blog…
Have been meeting with senior teams at Yahoo, and Facebook, and Myspace…Whew! How much more social can we get??
Still trying to figure out exactly the right blend between Direct Response, Branding and Engagement. It’s not an easy balance, especially for an established online brand such as ours!
Soon, we are launching our “Points of Presence” as Chris Brogan calls them. We would have sooner, but we realy wanted to baseline our DR ads prior to layering in display or brand and engagement focused efforts. Now that we have the data, we think we’re ready to move! (I say think, because you never know what the lawyers/compliance officers will do at the 11th hour!).
And, I am in a new group! My “digital media” team, as it were, has been shifted over under the Broadcast and Sponsorships group. A good idea, in my opinion, and one that should give us a tighter offline to online mix.
Will post when we get our first combined campaign up…in the meantime, check out the winners of our Youtube video contest at http://www.freecreditreportband.com or visit the homepage of YouTube on January 28th!
ACEdge
Chuck Hollis had an excellent post on the “Do-ers” vs. all the “Experts” who constantly fill the social media airwaves: http://chucksblog.emc.com/a_journey_in_social_media/2008/11/those-who-talk-vs-those-who-do.html.
Certainly, we need forward thinking bloggers who constantly assess and assimilate new technologies, offerings and business models. But, it certainly would benefit all of us, if more of the “Do-ers” posted or at least more of the “consultant” bloggers used specific examples. Even if you are prevented from using client names, you could genericize results and efforts. Something tells me, however, there are far more “experts” who like to pontificate than actually implement for clients! While, certainly, much of Web 2.0 is about the individual, and the top bloggers are exceptionally good at personal branding, few and far between are the blogs that help all of us implement!
So to all the “Do-ers” out there…Keep up the good “work”! And, if you can take a break from implementation every once in a while, let’s post some things! And, to the “experts”…go easy on those us who are trying to get things done. It isn’t easy turning back 80 years of social/business culture!
Alan
Having worked at one of the largest, and most tightly controlled, data repositories, it may be that I am biased. But, I see a clear role for a new breed of service companies to help facilitate the freeing up of large data assets in a manner that also works from a compliance & security (and, no doubt political) perspective. Not quite “middleware”, but rather ”middle service”…firms like Mashery, or widget application developers like JS-Kit, are needed to help provide a singular point of contact to the large data systems on the back-end and the rapid proto-typing, restful (and restless!) start-ups eager to mash-up the data and explore the “nooks & crannies” of various business models and ideas.
For example, one area that is desperately lacking is an “Affiliate Network” for application developers that includes not only affiliate payment commission tracking (and proper ad serving within the widgets) but also API key management and compliance monitoring. Commission Junction, Affiliate Fuel, are you listening? Banners ads are dead, long live the widgets!
One thing that also needs to be cleared, however, is ownership of the “platform” or connection technologies. Contracts should have flow-through rights that both enable the middle-service firms to retain long-term advantages, but provide legal and marketing relationships to the large firms as well…similar to how existing affiliate networks operate from a “relationship” perspective and DART from a technology angle.
Expecting large data repositories or firms engaged in businesses that generate large amounts of data, but where data dissemination is not their core business, to build the necessary API management, payment mechanisms, and developer network programs is just unrealistic (unless you are Google!). Third-parties will be critical in this process of bringing this “dark data” into the light, and linking in big data assets for the better of all.
ACEdge
So, we are precisely two days in to the release of our “Ed McMahon” series of videos that compliment our “traditional” FCR Band jingle commercials. While completely unplanned from a timing perspective, their release has coincided nicely with our YouTube cover song contest (of aforementioned jingles).
While we were careful (and contractually limited) not to link the Ed promotions to the contest directly, we did cross link accounts and micro-sites. And, are working on the generally accepted internet principle of more content = more activity across all properties. It seems to be raising awareness and both campaigns seem to be feeding off each other. However, we have yet to see any bloggers commenting on both campaigns or referencing each as a component of the other (or an overall strategy). We’ll see how that plays out. My initial take-away is that we *should* have been more dilligent with securing rights to Ed across media for *all* purposes, so we could have more flexibility with mash-up work.
On a related note, our YouTube homepage spot (an expensive proposition indeed) does seem to have been “worth it” in terms of exposure for and activity in, our contest. Probably would not have been as successful without it. This bodes well for YouTube as a “broadcast” medium for us. We’re stlll crunching the $/eyeball and activity numbers, but it looks promising (despite the hefty price tag). New initiatives of iTunes and T-shirt gadgets to help extend the brand and interactivity should also help. Also, *really* glad we engaged such a savvy blogger such as @Halcyon to handle our community outreach. If ever anyone doubts that talented community managers should *not* be part of the media budget, please email me directly. It is worth weight in gold.
More “results” to follow, of course we’re only 1/2 way through the show, with voting not set to begin until the week of 11/2. But, already we’ve received some very good, engaging covers of our ads, and it’s great to see folks engage with your brand like this….good stuff!
Stay tuned,
ACEdge
http://www.twitter.com/ACEdge
Last month I posted about how we were implementing the mindset, and rigor, usually associated with traders or portfolio managers on Wall St. to our Account Executives/AM’s for their online marketing efforts. Well, we are one month in and making great strides! Today, not only did we implement and test everyone on the concepts and metrics around a Portfolio Improvement Index (basically an index of Revenue and Spend achievement vs. Orders) but introduced how we will shortly be introducing the notion of Risk as a mathmatical element in deal negotiating! Word.
Fantastic results: we are seeing more clearly which deals are profitable and which aren’t, and which partners introduce more volatility to our performance. I will be so excited, if we can actually achieve a perspective of online marketing such that we can create and effective Index for the overall internet and then, of course, be able to evaluate the Alpha and Beta of a particular partner, deal, placement or even creative! Can you imagine?
Ta-dow! (or should I say, Ta-DOW?:-)
Stay tuned for more results…
ACEdge
O.K. not really #368. I wish I had the time to post all the gory details of our emerging attempts at cultivating a community on (and off) YouTube. But, unfortunately, I also need to actually spend time *cultivating* said community:-). However, as some of you know by now, we have some new media assets available to compliment our wonderfully (or alarmingly, depending on your view point) catchy commercials.
One of these *new* assets involves Ed McMahon describing in rythmic detail, all his credit problems and how it nearly ruined his “golden years”. OK, some spin there. He really raps. And, it’s kinda funny, and kinda related to credit! how’s that?
But, it has nothing to do with our commercials and cover song contest (http://www.youtube.com/freecreditreport shameless plug). So, what does a social media novice do?
Well, we’ve decided to integrate him in some of our creative and channel page, and we’re going to cross-link the sites (www.freecreditreportband.com & www.freecreditreportsongs.com ). Hopefully, we won’t confuse the heck out of the 1500+ contest participants we have. We have coined the term “ensemble” marketing, and we hope this Jazz inspired approach of cacophony marketing, will elevate all levels of awareness and engagement, without thoroughly convincing our growing followers that we are nuts! (Which is true, but not pertinent).
More to follow…we’ll post “Ed” on Tuesday 10/14, which is exactly mid-way through our contest which ends 10/31…so we should be able to measure any pops we get. He’ll also be on some National TV, so we’ll be measuring offline to online…interested? You can also follow along with us on twitter for more “real-time” stats… www.twitter.com/ACEdge .
A
I’ve been working on a few contests lately, and have been thinking about trying to leverage the power of Micro-blogging to raise the awareness of charities and my brand simultaneously.
Thanks to Shannon Paul’s post: http://shannonpaul.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/learn-the-rules-so-you-can-break-them-well/
I have new ideas on leveraging Twitter to encourage folks to identify with a charity publicly and have my firm count replies with the “winners” receiving a donation from my firm after a period of time. Seems like a great way to “give back” while encouraging more conversation. I plan on reaching out to twitter to see if it would be possible to work on a new tag that could be auto-inserted on replies to make it easy for folks (so they don’t need to think about their charity score until it’s over). Thoughts? Anyone else doing something like this? Let me know…
ACEdge
